Top vintners share their wisdom with Vermont wine lovers

Sipping, tasting and learning at the Burlington Wine and Food Festival

Jun. 27, 2013

Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards in Santa Cruz, Calif., pours his wines and the first vintage of his hard cider for attendees at the Burlington Wine and Food Festival last Saturday. / Photo by Melissa Pasanen

Tasting spoons of Guild & Company's whipped ricotta with fresh local peas and mint served last Saturday at the Burlington Wine and Food Festival. / Photo by Melissa Pasanen

More

ADVERTISEMENT

About 1,000 people poured, sipped and nibbled their way through the fourth annual Burlington Wine and Food Festival on the downtown waterfront last Saturday. They also had the opportunity to meet and learn from a number of wine legends from Europe and California.

The event was organized by Mike Stolese, co-owner of the wine distribution company Vermont Wine Merchants, and his wife Tracy Stolese, owner of Arabesque in Shelburne.

When asked why he started the festival in the first place, Mike Stolese had a succinct answer: “Passion.” Then he elaborated, “There are so many good wines, people should have the opportunity to try them.”

In addition to trying dozens of wines and even some hard ciders, all of which are distributed by Vermont Wine Merchants, the festival’s two sessions offered opportunities to learn about wine.

A schedule of seminars covered topics ranging from natural wine-making with Kathleen Inman, owner/winemaker of Inman Family Wines in Santa Rosa, Calif., to the “misunderstood world of rosé wines” with Vermont Wine School owner and chef Kevin Cleary, also of L’Amante and the new Vin Bar and Shop.

Stolese said he’s always impressed by how the seminars fill up: “People want to not only try good wine and eat good food, but they want to learn something too.”

For the ticket price of $50 ($60 at the door), attendees could taste dozens of wines often poured by the renowned vintners themselves, including Walter Schug of Sonoma’s Schug Carneros Estate Winery and Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, as well as Dr. Ernst Loosen from the Mosel in Germany and Giorgio Rivetti of La Spinetta in Piemonte, Italy.

Tasting the range of Rieslings being poured by Loosen — from sparkling, to dry and then off-dry — Jill Flanders of Fairfax said it was the first time she and her fiancé Jim Bryce had attended the festival. “We normally drink whites like Riesling, pinot grigio and pinot gris,” Flanders said. “We wanted to expand. There are so many different wines to try.”

(Page 2 of 4)

Bryce added that the couple usually attends the beer festival later in the summer, but this year the tickets sold out in less than 2 days, he said, “so we figured we’d try this. It’s a different kind of perspective. It feels like more of a community than the beer fest, which is more like a celebration and can also feel kind of cliquey.”

To pair with crisp Rieslings, mineral-edged rosés and velvety pinot noirs, a variety of local chefs and specialty food purveyors shared tasting items like Guild & Company’s whipped ricotta with fresh local peas and mint, as well as more substantial plates for an additional charge like Belted Cow Bistro’s barbecued pork sandwich with broccoli raab and aged provolone (which paired well with a dry rosé).

Dennis Vieira, chef at Nika, the new concept in the former Three Tomatoes space on Church Street, was offering small cups of white gazpacho with house-made lamb merguez and green grapes as well as wood-roasted lamb skewers.

“I think it’s really important that food and wine work together and be in the same place,” Vieira said. “Here I am next to one of the best Italian winemakers,” he continued, gesturing toward Giorgio Rivetti at the next table. “It really opens up people’s horizons about food and about wine.”

Nika had also hosted one of the wine dinners that preceded the festival on Thursday and Friday evening, developing a menu to pair with the wines of Sicilian winemaker Marilena Barbera who was pouring nearby.

Barbera said she has come every year to the festival to represent the winery she co-founded in 2000 with her mother, building on their family’s well-established commercial vineyard. “I wouldn’t miss it,” the bubbly, animated winemaker said. “I love Vermont, all of New England actually. The community here is great.”

Despite her surname, the famous Italian barbera grape is not grown in Sicily, she explained. Her wines feature grapes like nero d’Avola in a full-bodied, fruit-filled but friendly red and inzolia, a grape native to Sicily, from which she produces a fragrant white with balanced acidity. The winery’s island location, Barbera explained, adds “a mineral salinity” to her wines. “They are simple, rich, not overdone, fresh wines from the ocean.”

(Page 3 of 4)

In an impromptu, unscheduled seminar, German native Walter Schug shared the story of how he was first invited to the U.S. back in 1959 to share his wine expertise and became a leader in the nascent California wine community, particularly driving the appreciation of pinot noir, the grape of his home region.

When he first arrived in America, “there was red wine and there was white wine,” the distinguished, snow-white-haired winemaker explained. “It’s amazing what has happened since…When I came to Napa, there were 16 wineries. There are over 400 now.”

He recalled for his audience how he pushed his employer, the trail-blazing Joseph Phelps, to let him grow pinot noir. “One day Phelps said to me, ‘We’ve got to stop fooling around with pinot noir. It just doesn’t sell,’” Schug recounted. Schug asked if he could keep working with it on the side and market wines under his own name. He paused as an incoming ferry blasted its horn. “That’s what he said,” Schug quipped with a smile.

As Schug helped America discover the pinot noir grape, Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, Calif., led the American way for Rhône blends combining lesser-known varietals like roussanne and mourvèdre following the failure of his own quest to grow great pinot noir in the early ’80s.

Grahm began his talk by invoking the rock musician Alice Cooper, to whom he bears a passing resemblance with his dark, gray-edged ponytail and expressive eyebrows. Although Grahm is known for making good wine approachable and for not taking himself or his products too seriously, he protested in a brief interview that he does craft wines that deserve careful attention.

“It’s like Woody Allen made so many great, funny movies,” Grahm said, “no one wants to watch his serious movies.”

As cyclists whizzed by on the Burlington Bike Path behind him, Grahm treated his seminar attendees to a tasting of a few of his more serious wines. While the audience tasted his “homage to Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” the winery’s flagship blend, Le Cigare Volant 2008 and the 2008 Réserve, he noted that during a recent tasting of 25 vintages of Cigare Volant, he found his earliest from 1984 and 1985 to be the most interesting and asked himself, “What the heck have I been doing for 25 years?” It is a paradox, he admitted, that “you don’t always think your way to better wine, you have to feel your way to better wine.”

(Page 4 of 4)

The red Rhône blend was followed by a tasting of its white counterpart, Le Cigare Blanc 2011 and then Cigare Blanc unfiltered Réserve vintage 2010, a deeply complex wine that he called “kaleidoscopic.” He acknowledged that tasting whites after reds is relatively unusual, but it works, particularly when drinking powerful whites like Burgundies or Rhônes, he said. “If you want to boost credibility as a wine geek, emphatically suggest pouring white wines after red,” he suggested with a grin.

In the audience for Grahm’s talk was Todd Trzaskos of Stockbridge who tweets as @vtwinemedia with the goal of spreading the word that Vermont has a strong wine culture.

The Burlington Wine and Food Festival and the fact that it can attract wine luminaries like Grahm, Loosen and others are an “indication and reflection of how advanced Vermont wine culture has become,” Trzaskos believes.

“We get allocations of wines that we have no business getting given our size,” he continued, referring to shipments of desirable, limited-distribution wines. “It’s the maturity of the market, both the locals and the visitors…For a small rural state, our wine culture is very worldly.”